Entertainment behemoths Walt Disney are planning on making hit TV shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost” available as free Internet downloads in an initiative to haul in new advertising revenues.
A report in the Wall Street Journal says that the freebie will come with a sting: episodes of the ABC shows will contain commercial breaks that viewers will be forced to watch (until someone comes up with a ‘fast forward past this crap’ hack, of course.)
Episodes of the shows being offered will become available on the Web the morning after they’ve aired on TV.
With the Journal reporting that ten advertisers have already leapt on board – including heavyweights like Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble and Unilever – Disney hopes that the delivery of programs over the Web will turn into a right little earner.
With digital video recorders like TiVo letting slogan-weary viewers fast-forward past the endless onslaught of adverts seen in the US, TV broadcasters are desperately trying to find ways to keep the advertising revenues rolling in.
Disney are hoping that their ad-stuffed free service – expected to be announced later today by the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, Anne Sweeney – will prove a hit with both consumers and advertisers.
Punch ups in Disneyland
In a vaguely connected story elsewhere, we can report that Mickey Mouse’s chums are deeply unchuffed.
Or rather, the poor exploited workers lucky individuals on conveniently short contracts who get to wear the oversized heads and hands of Disney’s lesser characters at Hong Kong’s Disneyland.
It seems that they’re disgruntled with superstars like Mickey and Daffy earning extra wages despite them doing the same job (i.e. wearing a ridiculous costume and waving a lot).
The disgruntled employees have brought the union in, but we’re hoping it ends up in a fully costumed fight.
Carphone Warehouse are going to stir up a hornet’s nest in the telecoms industry if they go ahead with rumoured plans to introduce a free broadband package in the UK.
Some industry experts believe that Carphone Warehouse are looking to repeat the soaraway success of fabled freebie ISP Freeserve, who came out of nowhere to overtake BT in the late 90s.
PR spin-mesisters at Carphone are thought to have christened their broadband campaign “Independence Day”, based on a feeble pun that it will give customers independence from BT.
New research reveals that around two million Brits have used VoIP packages to place calls over the Internet in the last 12 months, with the figure expected to double by this time next year.
Sound quality was the most common complaint with 29 per cent citing dissatisfaction with what’s reaching their lug’oles.
Protecting the VoIP future
Filez
CSpotRun
AvantGo
Companies are now starting to dip their toe into the world of Mashups/user-generated content – but when the user is generating it, the results might not always be what they expect or desire. We’ve seen a few examples of this today.
Amazingly the thing that they don’t appear to have noticed is that many people see Chevy as Uber in a couple of sense – the sheer size of their company and, importantly for this piece, in the sheer size of the cars on the road and fuel-guzzling nature.
We love the idea of corporate tools being used against those who are paying for they development, hosting and bandwidth, but suspect that corporate number two who approaches this may take a different approach. This won’t of course stop those who are angered by this type of thing using their own footage to the same affect.
Combining an application launcher with the Today screen, Spb Pocket Plus is designed to add a heap of functionality to your Windows Mobile 2003/5 device.
It has to be said that some of the ‘extended themes’ are something of an acquired taste, but SPB have thoughtfully created a Webpage instructing enthusiastic users on how to create their own.
Conveniently, the program can be run off a storage card to save device memory and there’s a ‘Safe Mode’ to help sort out any rogue software causing problems – just like its big brother, this only loads a basic set of drivers on start-up.
Google is launching an upgrade to its toolbar for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, adding enhancements to the search box and an antiphishing feature.
The new release includes feed integration with the Google Personalised Homepage, with the toolbar automatically detecting Web content available for subscription, and a click of the “Subscribe” button taking users to their preferred feed reader.
Gmail users should like the new feature that opens mailto: links on webpages straight into a compose window in Gmail – no need to copy and paste emails off Webpages.
Sony America has launched a new digital camera today for the trendy party crowd, the 7.2-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-T30.
Introduced to the T-Series is a set of selectable colour modes allowing users to choose ‘natural mode’ for subtle colour variations or ‘vivid mode’ for more intense colours – great for reproducing the full range of hues of the pavement pizza at the end of the night.
Other features include a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 3x optical zoom (f3.5-4.5), a hefty 3 inch “Clear Photo LCD Plus screen” and 58MB of internal memory.
Specifications
Don’t be fooled: natural language doesn’t mean speech; and Numéro isn’t referring to speech recognition, when it says it has found a method of “entering a new phase in shopping… an intelligent SMS technology for retailers that can understand unstructured text messages – or plain English – allowing customers to shop from their mobile phones.”
You send a text, and it responds. “If a customer wants to ‘find stores in Manchester that sell DVDs’ or ‘find a hotel room for three nights in Manchester city centre’ then the system will read and understand the text and send back the information. It will also give them a choice of reserving or ordering the product or service they want, and organising a home delivery,” said Colclough.
“The product, éSMS, has the ability to enact complex business transactions like product purchases, price comparisons, stock availability, or room reservations,” says the company – all from a text and a standard phone.
After hackers successfully managed to get an Intel-powered 
Once the installation process has done its thing and the Mac booted into Windows, users must then slam in their Drivers CD and sit back while it does it thing.